Facebook should just make a user's location required - not the ios permission to constantly track a user all over... but just a field on a user - city/state/country.
Or make it optional and just show that ad to users that have set their location field.
I don't think that's relevant here: the new prompts aren't about collecting gps data but correlating your identity across contexts. If you manually chose a city in Facebook, I think the ad in the other random app which used fb ad network would only be able to use it if the user said "yes" to the prompt.
I think theres a spectrum of techniques and no bright line. If you are temporarily in NY but live in LA, is it location based advertising to show the user an ad targeted to LA? What if you're at a regional airport and the only flights today are to LA? What if the ad network knows you have a flight booked to LA today? What if you have a lot of friends in LA so there's a good chance you will be there soon?
People would call the last one personalized and not "location targeted", but it's pretty hard to see where that flips.
Be careful not to conflate necessary with convenient. Static ads can still be local, e.g. in the local newspaper, on the radio station, on a sign post, or websites for local businesses/communities.
Agree. The spying part is what is wrong (and should be illegal without a consent and paid compensation). Ad agencies should not be allowed to track and model my behavior, and then use these models to sell me stuff. Or if they do they should pay me for it.
There are hundreds of thousands of businesses that happily pay for ads on Facebook over other platforms and see improved results after tweaking the targeting.
The issue is the privacy loss we get, not the efficacy of targeting.
I’m also skeptical of the claim that targeted ads don’t work better then static ads. However I think the default assumption should be that they don’t until we find evidence that they do. That is the burden of proof should be on the targeted ads.
All that said, I am not an authority on if any evidence exists, I have never looked into the literature my self, so perhaps this evidence already exists and I just don’t know about it.
At scale? Margin of error at best. I will tell you what my interests are by vising web properties that cater to them in that specific time. You deciding to keep showing me ads for a Nespresso machine when I'm reading about circular saws is idiotic.
That doesn’t pass the sniff test. Would you say that in general, you wouldn’t expect a difference in results if you sold Taylor swift albums to white suburban women in Iowa, versus black urban men in Atlanta?
You know what would blow both of those out of the water? Selling it to those that have indicated that they are interested in Taylor Swift as white suburban women in Iowa do not buy Taylor Swift albums. They buy mom jeans. Instead they are getting ads for Taylor Swift.
How do you increase your market past people who have already liked Ms. Swift?
The argument still stands - just replace TS with mom jeans. My point wasn't actually about Taylor Swift marketing - it was that demographic targeting is a reasonable way to identify an audience. Those mom jeans are not going to sell very well in a younger, urban demographic compared to Iowa.
Ebay didn't stop buying targeted ads, afaik they stopped buying a specific type of ad in google search that had the keyword 'ebay' in it. Most companies bid up their own searches with the theory that they have to or else their competitor would, but ebay showed that people who search 'ebay magic cards' would most likely skip the search ads and go straight to ebay.
No they completely stopped buying ads. The brand keyword experiment gave them the confidence to run an experiment to completely turn everything off.
>TADELIS: Yes. So, for non-branded search, we actually had no idea what the results are going to be. Because here, if I am searching for, example, a studio microphone I’m sure that on eBay I might find a variety of used ones. But if I’m not thinking about eBay, and I just search for “studio microphone,” if eBay doesn’t pay an ad, they might not even show up on the first page. And by the way, the automated machines at eBay that were doing the online bidding, they had a basic library of close to 100 million different combinations of keywords, because eBay has practically everything you could imagine for sale on the site. So, we really had no idea what the returns for the non-branded searches would be.
>TADELIS: And we took a third of these D.M.A.’s, and we turned off all paid-search advertising. This was an extremely blunt experiment where we’re saying, “What would happen if we didn’t advertise at all?” And to our surprise the impact on average was pretty much zero.
Given that ebay is a worldwide company that is relevant to pretty much everyone on the plant, it seems like they are exactly the case for targeted ads being least useful.
Nearly every company in the world does not fit that description, and I would bet that the vast majority of them would benefit from targeted advertising. One example being local stores targeted only to local people.
Targeted ads don’t work any better then static ads. This is new for me. Actually now that I think about it, all evidence I remember at the moment is anecdotal. So perhaps you are right.
Regardless of its efficacy, the legality should be out of the question.
Yes they do. It really bugs me all these HN threads state this and rely on their own personal experience not as an ad buyer but as a consumer. It's not true.
One can directly measure ROI and prove the value of this advertising. Especially FB provides for my business (political marketing) at least 10X better direct response value and that is mostly using 1:1 targeting and lookalike modeling.
I have routinely gotten over 100% immediate last-click roi from fb ads, for many clients.
I know for a fact many others have too. There are a ton of direct to consumer online-only products that easily measure this. Just make a page or item which you only use to advertise on FB. sales/spend. Game developers track this closely too.
This is anecdotal evidence. Nobody is disputing those exists. However I think FB and Google owe their existence a little better evidence, such as A/B testing, control group studies and even experiments to actually demonstrate their effectiveness. Until we have those (and perhaps we do; I seriously know nothing of the existing literature) the anecdotal evidence we do have should be taken only as indicative of effect, not proof of effect. Anecdotal evidence come with a ton of bias.
Cool. Just as I thought. It seemed wrong that such an easily measurable thing would never have been tested and a whole industry (arguable the biggest industry in the western world at the moment) had never measured it (or they had and found no effect).
What I like about the HN discourse is that if someone slings out a statement which is demonstrably false, someone that knows better might respond with a correction. That is why I left this comment, as I all my knowledge with the targeted ad business was anecdotal, and I desperately needed a correction.
i know... and so do probably most major and direct response marketers.
there are a lot of ways to measure outside of FBs analytics tools.
including the very simple simply using a refcode or even a specific product/url. How many purchases did you get / how much did you spend?
this is what i'm referencing. like that's so incredibly basic and it bugs me HN just either doesn't understand or lets their opinion on it go first
In my experience FBs inaccurate reporting is just a tiny amount of impressions delivered and they refund the $1 or whatever it is a couple times a year. Have they ever had a reporting anomaly on their analytics tools for tracking off FB conversions? they very well could have but I haven't heard of one.
> there are a lot of ways to measure outside of FBs analytics tools.
There is no way to validate their impression/click data that all the downstream metrics are reliant on. If you have a way, I'd love to know about it. The claim isn't that they make up conversions, the claim is that they overstate the ROI and cv% based on the denominator.
I’m not sure it makes sense to speak this broadly about efficacy, since there are probably variations in returns amongst different targeting groups and value props. Execution matters.
I’m also not sure if it matters whether they are actually effective. At least for the short term. If people believe they are effective, is there any difference in the dynamic?
It is clear that an ad on a search page for a product works much better than something that is not relevant. What I’ve seen from my wife’s Facebook is that Facebook heavily promotes ads based on your search activity elsewhere. If they know that you are more likely to buy a product than a random person, it would definitely improve the ad effectiveness. In other words they’re skimming intent based on google searches.
I think it's less to do with targeting and more to do with a noxious business model. When your business model literally relies on wasting people's time and/or compromising their privacy, it shouldn't be surprising that people eventually develop workarounds (ad blocking) or provide a business incentive for a third-party company (like Apple) to implement countermeasures.
to be fair, that could in part be the Baader-Meinhoff effect [1], where you'll only remember the ones that were scarily accurate (though I do agree with you).
I don't know what the hit rate was, because as you suggest I likely ignored the irrelevant ads. However, the ads that were relevant were so eerily accurate (including things many of my friends and acquaintances wouldn't know about me) that I didn't want anything more to do with the platform.
It’s an insidious racket at worst, and at best a case of an emperor with no clothes.
Mass advertising needs to die off already. Just hold better search and filtering tools and empower people to discover what they want instead of telling them what they should want.
